Robynettely

“Matadora”by Steve Perry. Not the Journey one. Found this at a flea market; it’s the Steve Perry book Ed’s always looking for, so for $2 I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Ed had suggested Steve Perry because of the way I talked about Seventh Sigma last month – the way martial arts were described to a non-fighting audience. “AThousand Words for Stranger” by Julie Czerneda. She led a workshop at Ad Astra in April, and it was good. It’s the reason I sent out the zombie thing, which was an important thing for me. So when I found this at the (same) flea market, of course I picked it up. I was strangely reluctant to read it. Perhaps I don’t read as much science fiction as I like to think I do, and sometimes the effort required (you have to suspend a different kind of disbelief reading SF and fantasy than, say, Urban Fantasy, which is probably the easiest. Or YA of any sort. Eventually it moved to the top of the pile. I found the first parts disorienting, but then I suppose tha...

In addition to providing the social interaction that leads to the plot of this year’s NaNoWriMo project (which I’m referring to as the steampunk panama canal community band evolutionary psychology novel) and the frame for the zombie novel, karate has other uses. Oh, besides teaching me to defend myself, improving my character, and being not a bad workout. Three weeks ago I started taking Chinese Poles at circus school. Strangely, I keep pulling my left hip adductor. Well, maybe I only pulled it once and then aggravated it the second week. The third week, I stretched a lot before class and it was fine. We’ve learned a few moves: how to climb the pole (hand-over-hand, using our insteps to start though the non-beginners use their toes); koala, where you hang on for dear life once you get to the top of the pole; Buddha, where you stick one leg out from koala straight to the side, and put the same side’s arm in front of the pole, and stick both arms out; and gargoyle, where you do ...

Someone on twitter tweeted this link, so I decided to try it on the zombie novel. OH MY GOD my novel is the girl who cried wolf. I didn't know.

“YMCA Basic Theory For Fitness Leaders”. By the Y. I took this course there, and so I had to read the book so I could do the take-home tests. First, I took the course because it fit in a slot in my summer, and every once in a while someone will say to me “you should be a yoga instructor” which I don’t know about, but whatever. My sister is doing a program in that stuff, and sounds like she’s mostly having fun with it. And I do a fair bit of helping out with karate, so knowing more about the Y and their ideas, rules, etc., can’t hurt. The book was kind of self-help. I left it kind of late, but did all the stuff I had to do in the proper time frame. There were ten chapters, and I would set a goal to do a chapter and then put the book aside because I’d met my quota. I went on at great length about this to the boy, whose study skills are useless, but it probably had no impact. I think I spent more time with this book than I saw him studying all last year. One thing I learned doing...

First Draft “Fairfax”. Around 115K, approaching climax.  I also have a couple of scraps of planning for this year's NaNoWriMo novel, and a lot of notes for various short stories I'd like to have time to do. More on that next month.  Editing The editing was going really slowly, so I took an idea from music – leave the instrument out. I’ve probably mentioned before, my oboe teacher told me to practice 10 minutes per day. If you take the instrument out every day, you’re bound to practice more than 10 minutes some of those days (or quit because you really do hate it). Anyway, so I left my editing project open to the page I’m at on my work table, just to see what would happen.  Lo and behold, I would sit down with 45 spare minutes and mark up 20 pages or so, and stop when I got to a hard bit, and then come back and that hard bit would suddenly have a solution the next day, or a couple of days later.  Next problem was data-entering those markups....